Saturday, 22 December 2012

Knowing Goethe’s thought, his
juxtaposition of two apparently contradictory upbringing requirements
can neither have meant “roots” in the sense of ‘motionless’,
nor “wings” in the sense of ‘restless’:
he must have meant that we can’t find roots unless we’re able to
go look for them, and that we can’t fly unless we also can perch.
Roots expand towards where their nutrition comes from, and flying
creatures thrive in the homes that they choose to build for
themselves. Likewise, we learn to seek what makes us grow and thrive,
and flee what doesn’t.

I was reminded of Goethe’s quote
years ago, when I read a fascinating book, Elders: Wisdom from Australia’s Indigenous Leaders.
In it, Peter McConchie reports one elder as saying: “We always knew
the people were okay because they would come home” which, to me,
describes the feature which makes a cultural community acknowledge
someone as their own: these people knew that they had a home to
return to, which means that they had been taught to leave it. And the
elder adds: “They knew to get home, it’s instilled in them, in
their spirit and in our stories.” I particularly liked this
formulation: their individual, winged spirit, was nurtured by
our stories, the roots of our culture.

We all start sprouting root feelers as
soon as we realise that “home” is just, well, wherever you feel at home.
We find our individual bearings in a multitude of
environments, whose distinctive cultural, linguistic and personal
habits we can only appreciate once we learn to let go of them, so we
also learn how to go back to them, if we so wish. There’s nothing
like distance, physical or intellectual, to teach us how to take flight and stay rooted
which, to me, is what learning about ourselves is all about.

I wonder whether I’ve just given you
a couple of ideas to go and visit, or revisit, these books. I’ll
certainly do the latter. Reminiscing about them also reminded me that
this is the perfect time of year to find a cosy place from where to
fly away by means of cosy reading. I’ll be back next year.
Meanwhile, I hope you’ll be able to take time to savour your
own roots and wings, too.

Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Generally speaking, speech concerns
physical abilities, whereas language concerns cognitive abilities.
Speech is what we say and hear, in actual linguistic interactions,
language
is what allows us to produce and perceive speech as mediating
meaningful interactions. This is why speech bubbles are called speech
bubbles and not language bubbles.

The medium of speech is sound, although
language ability does not exhaust itself in sound-mediated languages:
sign languages
are a case in point, making it clear that speech and language are
independent abilities.

Both speech and language
feature in the job description of clinicians dealing with spoken means of expression.
We can produce and perceive what sounds like intact speech but might
not be cognitively processed as meaningful interaction, as John Cleese demonstrates in
a lecture about the human brain; and we can have intact language
abilities without being able to produce intact speech, as when we
stammer or stutter: Cleese’s Monty Python co-star Michael Palin
explains what led him to create the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children.

Stammering and stuttering are a source
of concern among parents of multilingual children, judging by the
amount of queries I receive on this topic. The usual question is
whether multilingualism can “cause” these disfluencies. The
answer is that it cannot, because multilingualism is a matter of
language, not speech – and because multilingualism does not “cause” any problems of any kind
(I’ll have more to say about “causes”, scare quotes included,
in a coming post). Stuttering and/or stammering are
well-attested consequences of something else, small children’s
newfound abilities to string words together by means of grammatical
constructions, and newfound eagerness to say everything they want to
say at the same time, as I noted before.
This is why children may stutter/stammer in one of their languages,
but not in the others, and these are developmental rather than
pathological issues, which sort themselves out in time.

Other features of child speech may have
similar or different explanations. Having “trouble with ‘r’
sounds” (another common question I get) can also be developmental.
These speech sounds are among the last ones that children acquire,
because their production involves quite sophisticated control of
articulators and airstream. Many of us have trouble with ‘r’
sounds throughout life, in early or later languages: just do a web
search on e.g. “rolled r”, or “learn to trill”, or
“pronouncing r”, to see what I mean.

In contrast, “not pronouncing the
letter ‘s’ at the end of words”, as one parent once wrote, may
be worth investigating further. Sounds represented by ‘s’ are
also a typically late acquisition, and avoiding their troublesome
articulation by omission is then a developmental speech issue.
However, depending on factors such as the child’s age, or
linguistic environment,
absence of ‘s’ sounds at the end of words may point to a
grammar issue, and so to a language issue: in several languages, including English, word-final ‘s’ sounds represent grammatical noun
plurals or person/number verbal inflections, of which the child may
not be developing cognitive command, as in, for example, SLI
(Specific Language Impairment). My Ask-a-Linguist FAQ ‘Child language acquisition’ gives a brief
overview of typical language development, meant to help caregivers
make informed decisions about whether and when to worry about
children’s speech and language development.

Language ability can be gauged through
speech – though not exclusively. A bit like driving ability can be
gauged by the way you drive a car, though not exclusively. Analysis
of speech samples collected from clients is one of the many ways
through which speech-language clinicians acquaint themselves with
their clients’ abilities, in order to decide whether and how
clinical intervention is required for speech, for language, or both.
The ASHA
site has more information on speech and language in clinical
settings. And Charles Sturt University has just launched an online
resource dedicated to Multilingual Children’s Speech. It includes
a downloadable Position Paper,
created by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual
Children’s Speech, of which I am a proud invited member.

The next post will have something to
say about a well-known cause (no scare quotes) of our speech-language
abilities: the ways we’ve learnt to adopt and shed cultural traits
which characterise our different environments.

Saturday, 1 December 2012

The titles Speech-language Therapist
and Language Tutor name different job descriptions, different
qualifications and, therefore, different professional competencies:
speech-language therapists (or speech-language pathologists, in
alternative terminology) do therapy, language tutors do tuition.

In practice, however, the distinct
services that these professionals provide are sometimes not so
distinct. One reason might be the resilient confusion between two meanings of the word language,
in English and other languages. Both job descriptions include this
word, although language therapists (let’s call them so) deal with
overall language ability,
whereas language tutors deal with specific languages.
Another reason stems from both specialists being called upon to
intervene in a child’s life because there is a problem, or a
suspected problem: language therapy addresses problems which affect
all of the child’s languages (e.g. language delay), whereas
language tuition solves problems with specific languages (e.g.
everyday or specialised exposure)
which bear no relation to the child’s other languages.

Interestingly, the merger of
professional competencies works one-way only: you probably wouldn’t
dream of entrusting your child’s possible language disability to a
qualified language tutor, whereas you do expect qualified language
therapists to address deficiencies in particular languages. I’ve
had reports of therapy-for-tuition services of this kind from a
number of countries in Africa and Asia, although I doubt that they
are restricted to these parts of the world. I would be very
interested to know whether the same situation holds elsewhere.

Let me try to work out why this
situation arises at all. Children naturally acquire the language uses around them,
from elders and/or peers. These uses may not match what parents or
schoolteachers deem to be desirable ones,
where “desirable” means ‘standard’. In matters of language,
the word “standard”, in turn, means ‘good’,
whereby non-standard uses of language are ‘bad’, that is, in need
of remediation. By the same reasoning which recommends clinical
assistance for bad health, cure for bad language should also be
sought from a qualified clinician.

I mean the word cure quite
literally. An increasing number of typical child language features have also come to
merge with features of disordered development, drawing on current
standards of normality which are as usable, in practice, as current
standards of physical beauty. Almost 70 years
ago, in her Lark Rise to Candlefordtrilogy depicting life in the English countryside in the 1880’s,
Flora Thompson saw it coming :

“The general
health of the hamlet was excellent. The healthy, open-air life and
the abundance of coarse but wholesome food must have been largely
responsible for that; but lack of imagination may also have played a
part. Such people at that time did not look for or expect illness,
and there were not as many patent medicine advertisements then as now
to teach them to search for symptoms of minor ailments in
themselves.”

Any label which remotely hints at
clinical disruption, tagged on to a child, will drive zealous
caregivers to appeal to those whose job descriptions likewise include
clinical labels.

Misguided referrals of this kind count
as false positives, where typical multilingual behaviour is mistaken
for language disorder. In time, cumulative practices “identifying”
multilinguals as disordered become standard practices, in yet another
interesting meaning of the word “standard”: as Brian Goldstein
quotes in a previous post:
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial
appearance of being right.” Accepted habits boost reluctance to revise mindsets and practices,
with two consequences: overworked language
therapists, squandering time and resources tuned to atypicality on
typically developing children; and blindness to false negatives,
which mistake disorder for typical multilingual behaviour and thus
fail to identify disordered multilingualism.

A third
consequence, perhaps the direst of all, is the stigma which sticks to
the children who get singled out by means of special labels. Not just
because “special” is Correct-Speak for ‘not-quite-up-to-par’,
but principally because labels go on deciding our
opportunities for us.

Next time, I’ll
deal with the bit that I missed, in this post, in the label
speech-language
therapist.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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